Yesterday and today are my white space days. Some work and a lot of reading getting done, but also relaxing and catching up with friends and magazine time. Reminder to get yourself that white space.

Tuesday night is part two in a three part series of social media workshops I’m presenting with DTRC/AHA – this week we’ll get into the strategy.How do we use social media? How can we best engage our followers? Get answers to these questions in this seminar aimed at companies and individuals who already have some social media presence. We’ll help you understand how you can connect and combine your online presence to make sure you’re reaching the right people with the right content for them. We’ll go beyond the basics and expand your social media toolkit with hands on tips and tricks such as cross-posting, Hootsuite, scheduling posts and tweets, and more!

Thrilled to announce the addition of two new clients to my life, I’ll be doing social media strategy and execution for Kids’ Entertainment – delighted as I’ve known the owner since my touring conference days and it’s great to work together again. And I’m super pleased to be the marketing/PR for the 2013 Siminovitch Prize.

Confirming it was indeed a busy and excellent week – teaching engagements, clients and the unconference yesterday.

These things have in common the fact that MANY people want to know more about social media, how to use twitter, what to say on Facebook. I mentioned the other day I spend a great deal of time talking about the why of using these things. Sometimes I think the why can be more important than the how.

Excellent article sent to me yesterday by a friend and colleague Avery Swartz.

“But I fear that the power of social media is being touted by many who are not aware that there are other forms of marketing that are just as essential. In fact social networking activities are not a panacea. They are tools for reaching large numbers of people, inexpensively, but they are not yet the tools that bind people to us enough to make them major donors, board members or volunteers. But we need other, more personal and engaging activities as well.” read more

It reinforces something I also tend to remind people – there is no magic bullet. Social media is one more tool in your marketing kit – just because you make a Facebook event does not guarantee you anything, let alone a sold out house. Think about it.

“Well, we printed 5000 flyers!”

“Well, there are 1000s of posters all over town!”

“well we have a Facebook page!”

So? What are you doing with all these things? What is the why for you and your audience?

In other words it’s been a busy week and my brain is full. I need some white space. From webdesignledger.com

“Even though its name seems to suggest otherwise, whitespace doesn’t actually have to be white. It gets its name from the early days of graphic design where most printing was done on white paper. Whitespace is simply the empty space between and around the elements of a design or page layout. This can include: space around graphics and images, margins and gutters, space between columns, and even the space between lines of type. Whitespace is also referred to as “negative space”.”

What does white space do? Allows space, allows your eyes and brain to rest. Space to process and think. Allow yourself some whitespace to absorb just everything you’ve dealt with that hour, day, week. If your brain is too full, you can’t do that. It’s why we get those best ideas in the shower, or after sleeping on it. Your brain is still hard at work, but you’re not force-feeding it. I’ll say again – read this book. It’s brilliant.

To use a final metaphor – if you’ve ever done all the prep to cook a dish and them dropped all the ingredients in a too small pan, what do you do?
You put it in a bigger pan.
Ingredients need room to cook properly. So does information. So do ideas. Have a good weekend. Get yourself some whitespace.

Like this:

Off to the AGO in a couple of hours for the Small Wooden Shoe unconference! Details later next week on how it was. I am super excited to see who’s there and what we’ll talk about.

In the meantime – from Seven Sentences – it’s extremely appropriate for our world, I think, and for me. This week I’ve just cleared a three-day migraine in time for the unconference which delights me. The migraine did not, as there were still clients to work with plus two nights of teaching and press releases to send out and proposals to write and ideas to dream up and execute despite the truly foul pain taking over my head. Anyway!

the tagline is: The world in which we do the work is changing. Let’s share how we’re dealing with that.

in case you don’t know, an Unconference is “many things to many people. But to us it’s an event where the content of sessions is participant driven and in which you spend most of the time in conversation with others who care about similar things. There are no panels or lectures. You’ll get to propose sessions and only attend sessions that are helpful to you. You’ll be in conversations not as a representative of your organization or as an “emerging artist” – but as an individual who wants to help and to get better.”

I went to one of these years ago, same folks organizing it. I think it will be interesting to see how it has evolved and equally importantly, how I have.

You should sign up and go. If you’re wondering who else goes to these things: “Theatre people, dance people, music people, performance art people, people who don’t identify by genre. Actors, directors, dancers, designers, playwrights, technicians, administrators, marketing people, Artistic Directors, fundraisers, video artists, dramaturges, General Managers, students, teachers, people who don’t identify by occupation. “Emerging,” “Mid-Career,” “Established” “Award-Winning,” “New Arrivals,” “Culturally Specific,” “Ethnically Diverse,” “White,” “Not white,” people who don’t identify by those kinds of phrases. Older people and younger people and yes, people who didn’t identify by age. All those kind of people.”

I’m looking forward to it.

co-hosted by Small Wooden Shoe, The Art Gallery of Ontario and Necessary Angel Theatre Company

accessibility partners: FADO Performance Art Centre, The Toronto Arts Council and The Ontario Arts Council

We started this Club in early Spring 2011.This blog went live December 2011. We are motley crew collective of female burger lovers in Canada,specifically Toronto, who love everything about burgers, any kinda burgers! We are not babes.We are not Barbies.We ARE BROADS! We’re redefining burger culture and most importantly, what it means to be a BROAD We will NEVER talk about big burger chains! THAT’s a Promise!We share our love of burger culture from meatatarian to vegetarian from all around the World.

I asked why they were doing a burger-based fundraiser for a vegetarian food bank and got this answer: “because I like to raise funds and awareness for organizations that don’t get much press or monetary help…being Burger Broads, I figured it should be for a food bank but since DailyBread.ca is a big outfit (and do fine without our help) I wanted to go with The Veg Food Bank. (who knew?! there was such a thing!? I love it!) Also, when people hear the word burger or Burger Broads.. they assume that it is meat… well, it is but it’s not. A burger can also be a vegetarian burger and we eat those too!”

Valid question, excellent answer and the idea of having a fundraiser for an organization that doesn’t get much press or financial assistance is something I can get behind. So I’m going. You should too. Burgers, beer and prizes for less than fifty bucks. Click here for details.

Speaking of small organizations, this week I’m seeing Antigone Dead People by Small Wooden Shoe. Three shows only, am heading to the Friday matinée. You should come, click here for details.

Speaking of things that make me smile (well, we weren’t, but I am, so there you go) – Stratford has succumbed to Gangham Style. Made me smile out loud.